The Platonic Ideal

Regular Chiropractic Care and Ongoing Wellness

Regular chiropractic care is an important component of any health, fitness, and wellness program. Whether you're engaged in upgrading your diet, beginning or enhancing a program of regular, vigorous exercise, or launching a meditation or awareness practice, regular chiropractic care helps provide the physiologic framework by which you can achieve the greatest benefit from your wellness activities. In order to derive optimum benefit from your diet, fitness, and wellness programs, your nerve system must be functioning at peak capacity. Your nerve system is your body's master system. Accurate and timely flow of information is required between your nerve system and other systems, such as your digestive, hormonal, and cardiorespiratory systems. Interruptions in the flow of these signals or miscommunications will prevent you from obtaining maximum value from your healthy diet and exercise activities. By detecting and correcting spinal misalignments that cause nerve irritation, regular chiropractic care helps ensure that all your body systems are working together in harmony. As a result, regular chiropractic care helps you and your family achieve long-term health and well-being.

Plato's Ideas were perfect templates, of which everything we perceive are tangible representations. But the Ideas were not to be found in the world around us. Rather, they were conceptions of rational thought, transcendental objects of knowledge existing in a realm beyond our own. And yet, Plato's Ideas continue to be a source of inspiration and wonder, more than 2400 years after he first described them. These ethereal notions continue to function as critical guideposts, significant markers along our various life journeys, standing for ideal outcomes we are striving for and hope to achieve.
For example, we all have our own ideal image of what physical fitness is supposed to look like. These ideal images may vary from person to person, but each image ultimately derives from a Platonic Idea of physical human beauty, strength, and musculoskeletal proportion. Our conundrum, if we care about health, wellness, and fitness, is how we're going to go about achieving our ideal. As we proceed along our path to optimal physical fitness, it's very important to keep in mind that the Idea, as such, is not an actual part of our world. We will fail if we seek to achieve such perfection. A reasonable goal is to do what needs to be done and continue to do our best in all such endeavors.
A primary major access to physical fitness is starting and maintaining a healthy, nutritious diet. Such a diet involves making consistent choices from all of the five food groups, that is, fruits, vegetables, grains, protein foods, and dairy products. Each of us has our own specific preferences, and some of us may have specific requirements, such as being gluten-free or lactose-free, but the requirement for variety and obtaining the nutrition provided by each group remains the same for everyone. Importantly, international health agencies strongly recommend eating five portions of fresh fruits and vegetables every day. In the United States, this recommendation has been termed, "Five to Stay Alive".
A healthy diet, maintained over months and years, provides across-the-board benefits for fitness and wellness. When combined with a program of regular vigorous exercise, healthy eating results in conversion of unneeded fat to lean muscle mass, weight loss, and an enhanced sense of well-being. Research consistently demonstrates that a healthy diet reduces the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke.¹ A healthy diet reduces the risk of cancer, diabetes, and obesity.² Thus, a healthy diet not only helps us achieve our own representation of the Platonic Idea of physical fitness. A healthy diet helps us achieve our own demonstration of other important Platonic Ideas, those of happiness and harmony.^{3
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1}Koutsos A, et al: Apples and cardiovascular health--is the gut microbiota a core consideration? Nutrients 7(6):3959-3998, 2015
²Esposito K, et al: A journey into a Mediterranean diet and type 2 diabetes: a systematic review with meta-analyses. BMJ Open 2015 Aug 10;5(8):e008222. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-008222
³Richard A, et al: Associations between fruit and vegetable consumption and psychological distress: results from a population-based study. BMC Psychiatry 2015 Oct 1;15(1):213. doi: 10.1186/s12888-015-0597-4

Climbing the Hill

Regular Chiropractic Care and Healthy Exercise

Regular vigorous exercise is critically important for retaining and maintaining optimal good health. But injuries may happen, disrupting our plans and best intentions. It's difficult to prevent random injuries, which by definition occur without cause or warning. One key to prevailing in your long-term exercise program is to minimize the likelihood of injury by maximizing your fitness potential. Preventable, rather than random, injuries are often caused by tightness and/or imbalance of muscles that support spinal movement and spinal weight-bearing. These muscles include the erector spinae, quadratus lumborum, longissimus thoracis, and longissimus cervicis. These spinal stabilizers assist in all forms of exercise and their optimal functioning is required for any maximal effort. By identifying and correcting misalignments of spinal vertebras, regular chiropractic care helps ensure full and free movement of these important spinal muscles. As a result, regular chiropractic care helps you and your family get the most benefit out of the time you spend exercising, helping you to improve your long-term health.

Climbing a hill is a useful metaphor for activities involved in accomplishing a major goal, overcoming longstanding obstacles, or achieving a noteworthy milestone. But you must be prepared to engage in such a climb. Striking out without a metaphorical map, compass, bottle of water, or raingear will consistently result in limited success or actual failure. From a health and fitness perspective, climbing a hill may represent a real, concrete process. When you're out on your daily walk or run, unless you live and train entirely at sea level you're going to encounter changes in elevation. If you live in mountainous regions such as Southern California or along the Appalachian Trail, such variations in terrain require greater levels of aerobic capacity. Unless you want to spend your exercise time huffing and puffing, climbing a hill in the literal sense necessitates a high level of cardiovascular fitness.
Cardiovascular fitness may also be termed cardiorespiratory fitness.¹ Such fitness refers to heart and lung capacity. With increased cardiorespiratory fitness, your heart's stroke volume increases. In other words, your heart pumps more blood with each beat than it did prior to attaining such fitness. More blood pumped per beat means your heart works less to achieve the same result. Your heart becomes more efficient, your blood pressure goes down, and your cells and tissues receive more nutrition more quickly.^2,3 Similarly, with increased cardiorespiratory fitness your lungs take in more air with each breath. Such increased lung capacity means more oxygen is available to cells and tissues more quickly. Your entire cardiorespiratory system becomes more efficient. You're expending less metabolic energy and obtaining greater metabolic returns. Cardiorespiratory fitness substantially improves your overall health.
Attaining the goal of cardiovascular (cardiorespiratory) fitness involves the same type of thoroughness as that involved in achieving family and business-related goals. You plan your work and then work your plan. Interval training is a proven method of enhancing cardiovascular fitness, a method that is both mentally and physically challenging. Accomplishing your interval training goals also provides a great deal of fun and personal satisfaction.
Interval training involves alternating intense and slow periods of activity. Let's say you run three days a week, you average approximately 12 minutes per mile, and you run 3 miles per day. Now you'll substitute one interval training day per week for one of your regular running days. On your interval training day, you'll begin by lightly jogging 1 mile. Then you'll run 1/4 mile at 2:45, that is, slightly faster than your regular 3-minute per 1/4 mile pace. You'll continue with 1/4 mile at a very light recovery pace. Next, you'll repeat the sequence of fast (2:45) 1/4 mile followed by the slow recovery 1/4 mile. Repeat the sequence once more, add 1/2 mile of lightly jogging cool-down, and you've run your daily 3-mile quotient. Going forward, you may infinitely vary your interval training sequences, running 1/2 mile, 3/4 mile, and 1 mile interval distances at slightly faster than your race pace. You'll get faster gradually as your cardiovascular fitness and aerobic capacity increase. Within 6 months of engaging in consistent interval training, climbing hills may seem no more difficult than running on flat ground. Not only will you have become much more fit, you will have made tremendous gains in overall health and well being.
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¹Lavie CJ, et al: Exercise and the Cardiovascular System: Clinical Science and Cardiovascular Outcomes. Circ Res 117(2):207-219, 2015
²Myers J, et al: Physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness as major markers of cardiovascular risk: their independent and interwoven importance to health status. Prog Cardiovasc Dis 57(4):306-314, 2015
³Nayor M, Vasan RS: Preventing heart failure: the role of physical activity. Curr Opin Cardiol 2015 Jul 3. [Epub ahead of print]